Peter Farrelly’s comedy is too repetitive to recommend. Mark Wahlberg supplies some welcome foolishness and Dave Palmer supplies a lively score, but the genital jokes keep coming after the film has run out of ideas.
Balls Up is a poor comedy with some willing performers and too little for them to do. Peter Farrelly directs a film that treats repeated genital jokes as sufficient reason to keep going. The script, by Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, is short of comic development. We have no objection to the subject matter, but a joke about genitalia needs just as much construction as any other joke. This film too often stops once the subject has been raised.
Mark Wahlberg, playing Brad, is the strongest reason to persist. His comic performance has an eagerness that suits this sort of foolishness, and he does not appear embarrassed by material that gives us ample reason to be. Paul Walter Hauser plays Elijah, completing the central pair, but the writing does too little to make their predicament become steadily funnier. The comedy needs each new mishap to alter what these characters can do next; instead, the set-pieces feel largely replaceable.
Sacha Baron Cohen gets a little further as Pavio Curto because his barely intelligible accent is a specific comic idea. We laughed at the difficulty of making out what he was saying. There is a small, immediate pleasure in listening harder and finding that the effort itself has become ridiculous. It is enough to show how much more useful a particular performance choice can be than another genital reference, though the joke has limited mileage.
John Brawley’s cinematography and Gary Mackay’s production design have football and jungle settings to work with, but the changes of location do little to relieve the repetition. Sam Seig’s editing cannot make these crude set-pieces feel like a story gathering speed. The film keeps providing another incident when what it needs is a consequence that changes the next joke. At 104 minutes, it has enough time to develop its premise, yet it gives the same sort of gag far more attention than it merits.
Dave Palmer’s music is more enjoyable. The samba and bossa nova influences give the film a lift without asking us to find another crude gag amusing. We would happily have heard more of that ease in the dialogue, which keeps pressing for a response rather than allowing comic embarrassment to build. The music supplies a welcome change of pace from the insistent jokes, and its lightness suits the comedy this film is trying to be.
We were bored by the repeated genital jokes, and the lack of movement in the plot made them harder to forgive. Gross-out comedy can accommodate thin characters, improbable events and a fair amount of ugliness when the timing is good and the consequences keep changing. Here, the succession of crude set-pieces gives us too few reasons to care about the next one. The script keeps returning to material it has already exhausted.
The occasional laugh makes the waste more frustrating, because there is enough comic ability here to suggest a better evening. Anyone attached to Mark Wahlberg’s comedy may find a few passages worth their patience, and Dave Palmer’s score deserves its own hearing. For the rest of us, 104 minutes is a substantial commitment to jokes that wear out quickly. A fondness for the cast will have to do most of the work.
